9/11 story from 1944

MOOR OR LESS

World War II POW always remembered his lost crew mates

Some years ago, I was getting ready to talk to the Sons of Norway group in South Bend when I noticed that one of my speech’s subjects was sitting in the audience.

Ralph Anderson was of Swedish descent and I guess that the Norwegians figured that almost made him one of them.

Our wives had taught together and I had once written a story about him, but he hadn’t come to hear me speak. In fact, he had no idea that I was giving a speech that evening … and certainly didn’t know that I was going to talk about him.

So I walked over to Ralph before I got behind the podium and asked if it would be OK if I talked about his service during World War II. It flustered him a little. He was a first-time guest and certainly hadn’t come to become the center of attention. But maybe when he saw the desperation in my eyes, this modest man finally nodded his approval.

His was a 9/11 story — but it happened on Sept. 11, 1944. That date had been his time of private reflection long before Sept. 11 became forever etched in the hearts and minds of our whole nation.

Ralph was a young bombardier on a B-17 and rode in the nose of the plane with a picture-perfect view of Germany thousands of feet below. On that day almost 68 years ago, they were bombing factories near Merseburg.

“Another bomb group had somehow gotten ahead of us, and we had to do a 360-degree turn to wait for our turn,” Ralph had told me for a Tribune story years earlier. “After we finally bombed our target, some of the flak was close enough to us that I could actually see their flames.”

And then enemy fighters zeroed in on them. One of their wings was hit and Ralph turned to see that the escape hatch was blocked by fire. He reached for the extinguisher and also had the presence of mind to snap on his parachute.

“No sooner than that, the B-17 went into a spin,” he recalled. “The next thing I knew, I was free of the plane, the air stinging my face where I had been burned. Apparently, the plastic glass in the nose had popped out and I fell out of the plane.”

On his way down, a man without a parachute passed him. Ralph recognized the plane’s navigator. None of the other crew members made it out of the B-17 before it crashed.

“I didn’t know it for certain at the time, but I was the only survivor,” Ralph said.

He sprained his ankle when he hit the ground, passed out and awoke to find himself a prisoner of the Germans. On his way to a stalag on the Baltic Sea, he could look out a little window in the train’s baggage department and saw some of the damage that his bomb group had done to the factories in Merseburg.

He ended up being a POW for seven months before the Russians freed him.

“What helped keep a lot of us going was that we knew we were going to win the war,” Ralph says.

Like so many of the Greatest Generation, Ralph returned home, used the G.I. Bill to go to college, raised a family and always put in a full day’s work at his job — mostly at Associates Investment Co. in South Bend.

He rarely talked about the war and lived a humble and happy life. He did take time every Sept. 11 to remember his crew mates and acknowledge how lucky, maybe blessed, he was.

People like Ralph Anderson made our country great. They buckled up their bootstraps after growing up in the Depression and surviving World War II and then never acted like anybody owed them anything for it.

At the age of 91, Ralph died last week while battling Alzheimer’s.

It always was a privilege to talk about him during a speech, especially that one time when he was in the audience.

World War II veterans like Ralph continue to leave us at a thousand-per-day rate. My hope is that we never forget how much we owe them.